Month: February 2014

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman

When I posted my transgender feelings in January, there were some interesting reactions. I want to clarify some of what I said and elaborate a bit.

Feelings and beliefs

A number of people interpreted my reports of trans feelings as evidence for “interiority” – claims that I’m really a woman inside. These interpretations are understandable given how often other trans people offer their own feelings – or simply the word “trans” – as part of such arguments. They’re inaccurate, though: as I wrote in a subsequent post, I find it hard to believe in anything as ineffable as a gender identity or an inner woman, and I don’t ask anyone else to.

Feelings are irrational

Some people were bothered by how little sense my feelings made, and how to some extent they rested on idealizations, fantasies and media images. I think it’s because when they talk about their own feelings, they expect them to make sense. I’m sorry, but I’ve long ago given up on expecting my feelings or anyone else’s to make sense. I thought I made that clear in the post. Maybe my feelings are more irrational than other people’s, but I don’t think so.

It’s normal for feelings to conflict with each other

I feel both a desire to be a woman and a desire to be a man. Some people take that as evidence that a person is “not really trans,” that they’re bigender or something. I take it as evidence that they’re human. I find it hard to believe there’s a person on this planet who hasn’t felt both of these desires. I find it harder to believe that there’s a trans person who doesn’t feel some desire for their assigned gender, or some discomfort with their target gender.

Moving toward and away from genders

When I posted about my trans feelings, I included both a desire to be a woman and a desire to not be a man. I think those feelings coexist, but they’re not the same thing, and it’s useful to be able to distinguish them. Similarly, sometimes I feel a desire to be a man, and a desire to not be a woman, which are also distinct feelings.

You may remember the movie Mrs. Doubtfire, where Robin Williams plays a divorced actor who can only spend time with his kids by posing as an elderly woman and getting hired as their nanny. In the climactic scene, the actor is pitching his idea for a new kids’ show to a producer over dinner in one dining room of a fancy restaurant, while in another room his kids need Mrs. Doubtfire. Amid numerous quick-changes in a single-user bathroom, hilarity ensues.

That scene may seem like pure comedy, but like all comedy it exaggerates a real and often painful aspect of our lives: identity stress. We all – trans people and everyone else – take on multiple roles in our lives, some gendered, some not. Sometimes you’re the teacher, sometimes the student. Sometimes you’re the artist, sometimes the subject. And often you’re nobody in particular, just a person on the street.

Each of those roles comes with different standards of behavior and the expectation of different treatment, and that can be more stressful than the different clothing that is sometimes expected. When someone who is used to being treated as a Very Important Person is confronted with the expectations of ordinary people, like getting pulled over for speeding or having to wait on line, a common response is, “Do you know who I am?”

This identity stress can be particularly acute for trans people, or anyone who takes transgender actions, whether they identify as trans or not. About eight years ago, Norah Vincent wrote a fascinating book called Self-Made Man, where she presented as a man called Ned and participated in a series of male-dominated activities such as competitive bowling and hard selling. She personally identifies as a non-trans lesbian and never had any intention to transition, but she felt what I call transgender feelings: a desire to be a man in order to escape some of the burden of her gender and partake in male privilege.

In the last section of her book, Vincent participates in a Robert Bly-style drum circle ceremony, and surprises the group leader by asking him to cut her with a knife. This feeling, relatively common among some women but so foreign to the type of man who typically takes part in drum circles, shocked and surprised the leader. Shortly after, Vincent checked herself into a mental hospital. She writes:

When I plucked out, one by one, my set of gendered characteristics, and slotted in Ned’s, unknowingly I drove the slim end of a wedge into my sense of self, and as I lived as Ned, growing into his life and conjured place in the world, a fault line opened in my mind, precipitating small and then increasingly larger seismic events in my subconscious until the stratum finally gave.

…

Ned had built up in my system over time. This allowed me to convey him more convincingly as the project went on, but it was also what made me buckle eventually under his weight. It was to be expected. As one rare (rare because insightful) psychiatrist would later put it to me when I declared that my breakdown would surely impeach me as a narrative, and hence impugn the whole project, “On the contrary, having done what you did, I would have thought you were crazy if you hadn’t had a breakdown.”

I’ve never had experiences like Norah Vincent’s “project,” or the restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire, but I have felt similarly torn between two identities. Setting aside presentation fatigue, if you have distinct presentations with distinct voices and mannerisms it takes time and effort to do the switch, mentally and emotionally. It also takes effort to keep them separate, to avoid using the wrong voice or the wrong walk. This can actually be fun once in a while, when it’s the point of the activity, but sometimes you just want to get a cup of coffee.

If you have any significant social interaction in an identity you will make social investments that are specific to that identity and difficult to transfer. Vincent made friends in her bowling team and other activities, and on 20/20 she met some of them as Norah for the first time. It seems clear to me that part of what precipitated her emotional crisis was the realization that she couldn’t have the same relationships with these guys without continuing to interact as Ned.

I’ve heard from other “part time” trans people that they have some people who know them in one identity and some in the other, without much overlap. This might be sustainable for someone who has lots of free time and energy to manage these mini-transitions, but it goes way beyond the minor identity stress that the rest of us deal with. I think that’s one reason you see so few people who lead that kind of double life.

In 2011, transgender comedian Eddie Izzard was interviewed on the Australian talk show The Project. As clips from Izzard’s live shows played, one of the interviewers said, “It’s wonderful watching these highlights, it’s a journey of outfits for you. Famously, you’ve dressed up in women’s dresses.” Izzard responded, “No, I wear dresses. They’re my dresses, I buy them. It’s like when women wear trousers, they’re not cross-dressing. They’re not wearing men’s trousers, they’re wearing trousers.”
Someone liked that quote enough that they made one of those distracting animated gif sets that are all over Tumblr, and people have been reblogging it around the world. After it showed up on my dash for the third or fourth time I said, “I gotta write a post about this. Izzard is probably the trans person I admire most in the world, but I disagree with him on this.” The Transfeminist Geometer said, “Let me know if you write a post. I agree pretty strongly with Eddie Izzard, so I’d be interested to read it.” And here it is.

There is one interpretation of “they’re my dresses” that could be said by someone who identifies as a woman. It means that of course they’re women’s dresses, because I’m a woman, so there’s nothing noteworthy about me wearing them.

I don’t think Izzard is identifying as a woman here, with his beard and all (although it would be damn radical if he did). I think he’s saying it as a statement of sartorial freedom, along the lines of the people who make utilikilts, and the fashionistas who tell us every so often that this is the year when men will start wearing skirts again. It means that these dresses may have been designed for women, but once I pay for them they’re mine, so they’re men’s dresses or transvestite’s dresses or something.

I disagree with Izzard here because for me the point is that they are women’s dresses. I don’t have any particular interest in a utilikilt or a men’s skirt. In fact, last week I went out wearing leggings under a sweater and jacket, but I’m thinking I don’t feel like wearing that anymore because they looked too much like the kind of spandex pants a guy might wear.

It’s like if you imagine a society in the future where everyone wears identical jumpsuits, but the women’s jumpsuits have one button more than the men’s. The transvestites will all want that extra button. Not because they like an extra button, but because it’s a woman’s button. That’s why I have women’s dresses in my closet. My women’s dresses.

Obviously, Izzard has a right to his own feelings about his dresses. He’s not wrong for that, and neither is the dude in a utilikilt, or the transwoman who buys her women’s pants at the Men’s Wearhouse. My disagreement with them is purely that I having different feelings.

But I wonder how different Izzard’s feelings really are. It’s possible that he thought that up just because he was tired of answering the same question about “women’s dresses” for so many years and wanted to say something different, just to mix things up and be funny. Kind of like I’m pretty sure he was joking when he told Greg Kilborn that the police shot him for shoplifting a makeup kit when he was a teenager.

I grew up in the seventies, with “future shock” and other environmental doom about out of control population growth. The argument makes a certain sense: we have only so much room, and we can only grow so much food. As Malthus observed over two hundred years ago, if the population increases faster than the carrying capacity of the land, misery is the result. The more people we have, the more hunger and pollution.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I started to hear stories on the news that were concerned with declining birth rates. Low birth rates can lead to work going undone, especially work supporting the elderly. It can lead to the bankruptcy of pension plans and even Social Security. They tell us it’s depopulated Russia, and the Japanese are worrying too! So which is it? Is a low birth rate good or bad? Do these people even talk to each other? And what does all this have to do with transgender issues?

I’ll connect this with trans politics in another post, but first, a low birth rate seems to be good for the planet overall. The population bomb people and the low birth rate people don’t talk so much to each other, but there are occasional examples. Matthew Connelly and Hans Rosling observe that as women get more power, education and birth control, populations stabilize, so they predict that the world’s population will stabilize as more regions industrialize.

One key thing to note about the “low birth rate” alarmism is that it’s almost never about the worldwide birth rate. It’s about the birth rate of a country, an ethnic group, a religious group or even a race, relative to another. You can see that in the concerns of Cardinal Meiser and the Russian elites, which are both about “the Muslims” outbreeding “us” – German or Russian Christians. And if you’re concerned about that race part, that should tip you off about the others, because they’re basically the same thing. A race is just an ethnic or religious group fortified with biological essentialism.

Concern about national birth rates is also the same as concern about ethnic birth rates, because low national birth rates are only a cause for concern if there are strong restrictions on migration. If population levels are the only reason for concern, then immigration is just as good a remedy as procreation.

At its root of all of this lies a desire for more “us” and less “them.” This is an ancient tribal feeling, and it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. But from the point of view of fairness and kindness, it sucks. “Us and them” is fundamentally opposed to “all men are created equal.”

Obsession with “our” birth rate is part of the reason some parts of the world are still struggling with overpopulation. It’s also a primary motivator for hatred of trans people. I’ll get into all that in a future post, but in the meantime when you hear concern about birth rates, take it with a grain of salt.

Someone got angry about my post on trans feelings, but on reading between the nastiness, she seemed to be mostly angry because she assumed I was claiming an “interiority” – her word – that my feelings were evidence of “interior womanhood.” I can understand why she thought that, because so many trans people do, but I don’t make any such claim.

Personally, I practice skepticism. In general I try to minimize the number of things in the world I take on faith. I find it comforting, particularly in understanding transgender feelings and actions. But in talking about trans phenomena, my skepticism conflicts with the way a lot of other people talk about those things. The key difference is in talking about transgender beliefs, specifically the concept of gender identity. But you don’t have to espouse trans beliefs to understand trans feelings or to argue for fairness and respect.

The typical story is that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men,” supported by a number of dubious and hotly contested brain studies. On this basis, everyone is asserted to have a “gender identity,” an “innate sense of their own gender,” and that is taken as the person’s “authentic,” essential gender. Often this is invoked to argue that it is the person’s destiny to transition. Genderqueer, genderfluid and other non-binary people are declared to be a mixture of brain genders on the basis of simple analogy, and the implication is that their only true path is to express gender in the corresponding proportions.

The critical thing here is that very few trans or genderqueer people have actually undergone a brain scan. Most of the studies that people typically cite were actually performed on the cadavers of trans women. Of course, trans people typically want to stay alive; many even frame it as transition or die. The official basis for determining gender identity is thus a simple declaration: “I’m really a woman.”

You can see why a skeptical approach would have trouble with all of this. If the primary basis for determining gender identity is a belief that we are “really” a different gender from what most people think, and I try not to believe anything without sufficient evidence, how can I as have any gender identity and still maintain my skepticism?

But wait, there’s more! The typical story is that gender identity is innate and unchanging, but anyone who has spent time around non-transitioners, non-binary people and people near the edge of the “transgender umbrella” like cross-dressers, drag queens, and people exploring gender, has seen things that give the lie to this idea. I’ve seen all manner of people who one day explain that they’re “just” men who feel a little feminine, and the next swear up and down that they’ve always felt like women.

In individual practice, one person’s determination of another’s gender identity is even more subjective than that. Typically, a simple claim of belief is not accepted without at least a declaration of intent to transition, but some people will overrule that based on their impressions of the other’s masculinity. Often, a person will accept another as trans (and thus as their desired gender) based on a declaration, but then question that gender if they do not demonstrate satisfactory progress in transitioning. Frequently, a trans or genderqueer person will make no profession of belief, but another person will make claims about that person’s gender identity based on evidence of transition, passability or impressions of femininity.

From a skeptical perspective, this evidence is unsatisfactory on three levels. First, we’re expected to accept gender identity on the basis of professed belief, which is inherently untrustworthy. Second, we’re asked to accept these beliefs as evidence of an innate, eternal state, even when they have changed. Third, we’re asked to accept beliefs, reported second or thirdhand, that are sometimes invented or assumed by the people reporting them.

Sorry, I can’t do it. I’m not going to spend years of my life resisting a belief in Satan or Pachamama, and then turn around and accept the Authentic Self without question. I don’t even really believe I have a pancreas, let alone an “interiority.” I accept that I probably do have a pancreas because the biologists seem to be right about fingers and sinuses and stuff, but claims of interior womanhood are a lot less reliable. So I don’t claim a gender identity for myself or anyone else.

The challenge is that I also want to be respectful and to fight for fair treatment for myself and other trans people. I can do that, because I don’t need to believe people’s beliefs to believe and honor their feelings, to treat people fairly and with respect. I just need to believe in their essential humanity. It works for me with Mormons and Buddhists, and it works with people who believe in gender identity. I wish more people would try it!